The recording of voice and data communications during telephone call sessions is becoming increasingly important in certain industries, particularly where the quality of customer interactions needs to be monitored for quality assurance purposes, or where legal or security issues resulting from customer interactions need to be considered. In the financial services industry, for example, the recording of telephone calls is often necessary to ensure legal and regulatory compliance with securities laws and regulations, and to evaluate customer interactions for quality assurance purposes. In some cases, for example, a telephone conversation between a customer and a broker may need to be saved for later verification by a broker-dealer that the customer requested a particular trade or that the customer was properly informed of the risks associated with purchasing a particular investment. Other industries in which voice and data communications are routinely recorded include the healthcare industry, for documenting health advice or to resolve patient disputes, and in customer service centers for settling customer complaints and for training purposes.
The recording of voice communications over a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network is typically accomplished using a record service or record server coupled to each user's telephone employed for handling call sessions, either directly via a built-in-bridge or indirectly through a router or gateway. In real-time applications, the voice communications to be recorded are often fed to the record server as a stream of data packets using a standardized packet format such as Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). Recording of telephone conversations can be done either automatically for each call received by the user, or selectively upon the occurrence of a certain event or condition or by a manual request received from the telephone user or from another third-party. In some customer service centers, for example, the recording of a telephone conversation between a customer and a customer service representative may be triggered manually by a request from the representative, or automatically from a software application in response to an event such as a customer complaint. In some systems, multiple record servers may be employed in a VoIP environment to provide a level of redundancy or failover protection in the event one or more of the record servers fail, experiences an overflow error or becomes unstable, is taken off-line, or otherwise becomes incapable of recording the data stream.
The use of network record servers for recording voice and data over a telephony network typically requires a large amount of bandwidth, and is often susceptible to infrastructure failures at both the network level as well as at the desktop level at the user's desktop. In some situations, the failure of a user's desktop to communicate with a communications manager operating over a telephony network can affect the recording of a single call or, in some cases, multiple calls. Network record servers also require directing massive amounts of data over a network, which can over-burden the network. This can result in a reduction in the quality of the recording and/or the failure to record a call session. In the event of a total infrastructure failure or where the network record server goes off-line or is otherwise unavailable for recording, the system may be unable to guarantee delivery of the data to be recorded. This is particularly problematic for those systems in which there is not another available record server, or where a backup server is available but is unable to meet the excess demand caused by the failure.